


Self-Made Man

by lost_spook



Category: Doctor Who (1963)
Genre: Backstory, Canonical Character Death, Community: dw_guestfest, Community: trope_bingo, Gen, Serial: s149 The Happiness Patrol
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-13
Updated: 2016-04-13
Packaged: 2018-06-02 01:53:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 956
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6545719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lost_spook/pseuds/lost_spook
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>"Close to the Kandyman, were you?" / "I made him."</i>
</p><p> </p><p>Gilbert M and the Kandyman.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Self-Made Man

**Author's Note:**

> Written (belatedly) for the 2016 Doctor Who Minor Characters Ficathon from the prompt: The Kandyman – his Kandy life. (The backstory for Gilbert M & the Kandyman comes from the serial, plus a slightly expanded version from the tie-in novelisation.) 
> 
> Also for Trope Bingo square "presumed dead".

_He never asks him if he wanted this; if death would have been preferable, and Seivad – the Kandyman – never says. Gilbert hasn’t really given him the option. It’s best that way. And, after all, Seivad was a scientist, an intellectual – he would have wanted survival first over sentiment; he wasn’t the mystical type to worry too much over body and soul if the mind could be preserved._

 

Gilbert finds Seivad lying there when he returns to the cave they’ve been hiding in since their flight from the city – bleeding, semi-conscious and cursing his bad luck and the lone vigilante who’d found them, but soon, only silent and yet still bleeding. There’s no time. There’s no laboratory to hand. Gilbert is reduced to saving a life by means of butchery. He saves Seivad’s brain: that brilliant, gloriously unique scientific mind, and he salvages his bones. He packs them all away in a suitcase and they accomplish their escape together, even if it’s not the way they’d planned. He refuses to think much about it once it’s done. He detests all this getting blood on his hands – so much blood, one way and another when you factor in the lives taken by that virus they never meant to create or set loose – but he cannot leave Seivad.

 

Where can an accidental mass murderer and his nearly-dead genius of a colleague run to? That’s the question, isn’t it? The best places in the galaxy won’t welcome them. After various short stops to confuse their trail and much talk in space ports and bars, Gilbert hears of Terra Alpha, and that’s where they wind up. It’s a terrible, candy-coated hell hole that’s cracking at the edges. In some ways, it’s weirdly perfect. There’s a downside to everything, though and its leader, Helen A, soon discovers his identity – and demands that he make her a monster out of what’s left of Seivad. Gilbert has little choice but to obey. 

He shapes Seivad to fit their new surroundings: he uses the only materials to hand again. Instead of a laboratory, he has the Kandy Kitchen. Probably that’s the nearest Helen A can come to a laboratory. Those would be sad places, after all. What sort of world needs dissection and cures for ailments that would go away if only one smiled harder?

He makes his new form for Seivad out of sugar and fat and colourings – out of bones and brain tissue, and mechanical pieces to marry the two. Seivad is now a living confection and exactly what Helen A wants. She calls him the Kandyman and Gilbert doesn’t argue. Even if arguing with dictators were good for his health, which it isn’t, whatever else his creation is, he’s not Seivad any more.

 

_He’s made a living nightmare. He’s made Helen A an executioner. Gilbert feels, deep down where logic doesn’t count, that what’s left of Seivad’s mind and body hates him. He can’t blame him if he does._

 

It comes to seem normal surprisingly quickly – or perhaps it’s not surprising after what he’s already done. Fondant surprise, sweetest of deaths, delivered down pipes: pull this lever back, push that one forward. The Kandyman creates confections that are so good the human frame can’t hold them: he makes sweets that kill people. He kills with sugar and an overload of bliss. Meanwhile, Gilbert builds a space ship because Helen A wants one of those too. It’s not as if he can get away himself, so he rather hopes she uses it sooner rather than later and leaves them all in peace to be miserable again. He’s stuck here – the Kandyman belongs in the Kandy Kitchen and, for now, they belong together, like an old married couple.

They bicker like one, too. Gilbert doesn’t mind. It passes the time. These days the Kandyman can shout and scream all he wants, but he doesn’t have the advantage – Gilbert does. That’s another thing that’s changed.

There’s something reassuring about it all, too: brightly coloured jars and recipes that the Kandyman uses what’s left of Seivad’s brilliant brain to adapt and tweak a little closer to perfection each time he cooks anything. All the ingredients around them, too, come in and out like clockwork and Gilbert takes comfort in the rhythm of it, the litany of the names – syrup and flour and fat and cocoa – liquorice, peppermint, coconut, and cream – colourings, flavourings, and preservatives. Sugar and spice and all things nice and a genocidal scientist’s insane spare brain. 

That’s what Seivad’s heart is made of now, too: caramel, toffee, sherbet, marzipan, gelling agents. It doesn’t work like it used to, Gilbert knows.

 

_The way they belong together, the way Gilbert’s arranged matters between them – it’s worse than marriage when you come down to it. He’s made the Kandyman totally dependent on him. It was necessary – he hardly wants Helen A deciding he, Gilbert, is dispensable._

_The reverse is true, too, however: Gilbert can’t leave the Kandyman, not like this. Even if one day he has somewhere else to run to, somewhere better than Terra Alpha and its sugar-coated darkness. If he had it in him to leave Seivad, he wouldn’t be here in the first place._

 

He doesn’t know what to think when he stares at the Kandyman’s ruins, only the mechanical pieces left, the rest dissolved by the lethal fondant surprise. There’s more sorrow in him than there should be, considering these are only second-hand remains of a monster, but there’s also a slowly dawning realisation that now he might be free. Escape is possible.

He doesn’t ask himself then or for a long while after, because some thoughts are best avoided: when he turned Seivad into the Kandyman, what did he make of himself?


End file.
